Dance, Dance, Dance

The Swedish singer who released her debut album to North America in May played a sold-out show on Friday night at the Mod Club to a crowd that knew every line of her songs.

Though she didn't perform her hit Until We Bleed, she performed ten songs off of Youth Novels. She wandered on and off stage between songs, returning to the warmly lit stage to tell the crowd with her sing-song accent, "That was a break for you to go get more drinks."

But the crowd kept their vintage boots fixed on the Mod Club floor, awaiting the songstresses' arrival back onto the stage, where she sporadically broke into African-style dance solos. It was a feat for a girl balancing her petite figure on four-inch high leather platforms.

In addition to her rhythmic stomping and clapping, she belted into a megaphone, trilled into a kazoo, and hammered a tambourine with a drumstick. Twelve songs into her 13 song set, she even zipped off her platforms and banged a crash cymbal with one of the clunky soles.

Her set-list too was full of surprises. First, a cover of Vampire Weekend's Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. A song that the New York-based band's Ezra Koenig says explores "the aesthetic connections between preppy culture and the native cultures of places like Africa and India." An appropriate pick for a girl who was raised between winters in Sweden and summers in Nepal.

She continued the covers with a version of Wendy Rene's soulful "After the Laughter Comes Tears". She topped the set off with A Tribe Called Quest's Can I Kick It?

Yes you can, Lykke. Yes you can.

(If you hit up her myspace page, her top friend is her musician dad, Zilverzurf. She has 2.5 million hits, while he has 12,000.)